Growing up in New Jersey, New York City was always just on the other side of the river.
And from just about every direction you came from, the first thing you saw was the Twin Towers.
If you were driving toward the city, heading for the Holland Tunnel or coming in from the highways in New Jersey, there they were.
But one of my favorite ways into the city was the Staten Island Ferry.
My family would bring our old station wagon onto the ferry, and as we came across the water, there were those grand, majestic, beautiful Twin Towers.
When I tell you I could feel the excitement in my bones, I mean it.
I loved those towers.
If I were making a Rushmore of the iconic places in New York City from my childhood, it would be the Twin Towers, Rockefeller Center, Central Park, and the Brooklyn Bridge.
Those places were New York to me.
They were Manhattan.
In a way, they were America.
And it still breaks my heart that the Twin Towers aren’t there anymore.
On Sept. 11, 2001, I was living in Connecticut. I had moved out of Manhattan several years earlier, but New York was still very much part of my life. I was back and forth to the city all the time.
That morning, I was supposed to meet my friend Mike Fulton at his apartment in Westchester to write a song.
I didn’t know what was happening at first.
I stopped at a bagel shop, and there it was on the television. Something was happening in New York, but I don’t think I understood the magnitude of it yet.
I decided to keep going to Mike’s.
As I drove down I-95, getting closer to the city, I was glued to the radio. I remember talking to Mike on and off.
There’s a part of my memory that wonders whether I could see smoke from Connecticut, but I don’t trust that memory enough to say that I did.
What I do remember is arriving at Mike’s apartment.
We tried to focus on what we’d planned to do that day, but of course we couldn’t. We mostly sat together and talked about what was happening.
We had both lived in Manhattan.
We knew that city.
We loved that city.
And 25 years later, I still feel a tremendous amount of loss.
For the people who died.
For the families and friends who lost someone they loved.
For the city that was changed forever.
And, in my own small and deeply personal way, for two buildings that had been part of the landscape of my childhood.
I can still picture them from the ferry.
I can still remember that feeling in my bones.
Twenty-five years later, I still miss them.
And I remember.